Field of the Invention
This invention relates to print job management solutions, and in particular, it relates to a method for efficient managing and routing print jobs amongst multiple printers by ranking the printers based on certain positive and negative print history factors and selecting the destination printer from the ranked printers.
Description of Related Art
Nowadays most print processing systems have adopted some kind of auto mode algorithms executed in their servers. Such auto mode algorithm is designed to help the server automatically route each received print job to its destination printer for printing. To that end, usually the auto mode algorithm provides some evaluation mechanism that can figure out which printer is the best printer to process each print job. However, the evaluation mechanism tends to involve too many factors and the underlying logic can be very complicated. When the number of printers in the print processing system keeps increasing, the processing time of print jobs in the auto mode can slow down considerably. Therefore, a need exists for an improved print job management method that can simplify the process of locating the best printer for each print job. Another need also exists to enhance existing auto mode algorithms so that print jobs can be routed and processed more efficiently.